Toby Jones: I never wanted to feel desperate about acting

0:02This is a Global Player original podcast.

0:11Hello and welcome to Full Disclosure, a podcast project conceived entirely to let me spend more time with interesting people than I would ever get on the radio. Toby Jones, welcome. Thank you. Very nice to be here. I mean, talk about the planets aligning from an axis point of view. in the last 10 days i've watched the conclusion of the hack in which of course you play alan rosbridge and i've watched you as iago in othello at the haymarket with david hairwood and last night i watched mr burton beautiful beautiful film about the um the teacher who essentially set richard burton upon the path to fame and fortune i think in the last 10 days i've seen more of you and I have of my wife.

0:56Yeah, sorry about that. It's been an unannoyed pleasure. I'm not in charge of scheduling. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? For civilians, it's weird. It'd be like, how many hours are there in your day? Yeah, I think people think that these things are done consecutively and you're working all the time to put this stuff out. But you are in a fairly purple patch. Yes, I mean, I don't want to put the hex on this interview straight away, but any sense of, I'm kind of superstitious about seeing any kind of, like a purple patch suggests that there's some, it's all going very well, and it's all, you know, it'll be fine now.

1:37And I'm not sure that's terribly healthy for an actor to feel ever. You know, you sort of feel you don't ever really want to arrive anywhere. Oh, I like that. Let's begin at the beginning. Briefly in Hammersmith, I think, but you grew up in Oxford. yeah i always say i'm from um near oxford a town called charlbury um that's where i spent my formative years from about the age of nine to uh to when i went to university and um yeah so originally literally born in london and then whisked out into the country and a happy home let's get right into that uh very very i i i yeah very happy home um i mean it's it's an interesting question is it because you spend the rest of your life reinterpreting your childhood rediscovering it from the different perspective you have on it without wishing to i mean i know the title is happy home but it's a late it's a big question there's a lot going on yeah yeah um i scanned the notes before i sat down with you before i always scan them once and then read them properly the second time and i did a double take when i read that you'd been in the elephant man with david lynch because i thought bloody hell he's not that old is he but this of course this was your father freddie so you came from a family of both parents were thespians.

3:03Yes. On my mother's side, my dad was a first generation actor who basically got enrolled into drama school by his girlfriend because he was so lost, trying to be a poet as a 29-year-old in Stoke-on-Trent, not fitting in in the early 1960s. And she basically revealed to him that he wasn't a poet. He was, in fact, probably an actor. and he was playing the part of a poet exactly which he did but i and as a consequence i think he had he was forever grateful for for for becoming an actor and it saved him and his mental health and everything whereas on my mother's side i've recently discovered that it literally goes back to people pulling carts around in the 17th century um like traveling players Wow.

3:56Yeah, which is quite extraordinary. And having always been rather ambivalent about becoming an actor in the first place, that has, that romance, as it were, of that story has made, has reconciled me a bit more with what I do. I feel an unexpected surge of pride to be linked in some way to that kind of background. Of course. which I didn't feel before because actors literally go back generation by generation back to that time. That's incredible. Did you discover this as an amateur or were you doing one of those television programs? No, someone, I did a show on Channel 4 called My Grandparents' War where I'm normally quite, I've normally said no to most documentary stuff just because I feel slightly compromised by having to reveal who I, a version of who I am.

4:46A bit like this. but I they said we've done research into your grandparents and what happened to them in the war and we think there's a program there I said oh what have you found out and they said well you have to do the show and then you get the room and it was through that that I began to find out really. That's magic isn't it? A sense of coming home almost or a sense of completion Yeah I mean I don't know I think I grew up feeling, watching my dad when he wasn't working and going, whatever happens, I've got to avoid that. And I've got to avoid this sense of being at the whim of the world. You know, I don't ever want to feel desperate about my job.

5:38and yet there is something about the adults I meet from this world who are so interested and engaged with people, who are interested in people, whether they're children or old people, anyone, that the actors I met, and I thought, why wouldn't I want to spend time with those people? But I don't know that I want to be an actor. And so I think at first I did question the terms under which I might. I thought I would end up in the business, but maybe not as an actor. Okay. And I don't think it was a home through which the great and the good used to troop, is it? Well, yeah. I mean, my dad was very, I mean, he had an extraordinary career, really.

6:21He made about 90 movies and he made various friends. And if you mean great and the good by that, you mean stars. And I think that there were people along the way. I remember I did a show called The Play What I Wrote about 20 years ago. and Roger Moore came to do it and all he wanted to do was talk about my father and talk about how much he adored my father because they'd done a picture called The Man Who Haunted Himself and they'd sort of stayed loosely in touch ever since so there was a connection even if my dad kept his work pretty much in work and we weren't carted off to sets or anything but yeah a Sting for example you know my dad was in June with Sting and Stingy also did the play what I wrote and he said oh your dad and I met each other in Newcastle because your dad would come on with a saucepan and drum with the Newcastle City man that I was playing bass with at the time so there were these weird connections going back to the 60s and 70s that I've subsequently discovered about my dad's sort of private life effectively I mean were you conscious of the glamour then you and your brothers if he wasn't really bringing work home with him did you realize that it was quite different from what all your friends dads were doing yeah i i think partly because i mean it was just normal to me but i think it was more that more what people project onto your life how they assume your life is and i think um that what i found glamorous in a way it's still what i find glamorous is the idea of a parallel time zone that one is working in that one gets a car comes at four in the morning to take you yeah to somewhere no one would know where you would where you are you then move into a different time zone to film the film you're filming and no one could sort of it's why i'm sort of slightly phobic about having my mobile phone with me when i'm at work because it sort of feels like i'm saying goodbye to the most romantic thing about my job by having my phone with me.

8:31So I love that aspect of it. I remember watching my dad being driven off and thinking, there's something about that that I really love, this idea of being taken away. A bit like when you saw people bowing at the end of a show and disappearing and you wonder, where do they go now? You know, as a child, those sort of things, I think, had a big impact. Like a sort of liminal space. You're moving into stepping out of the quotidian. Yeah. Gosh, yeah, of course. I'd never thought of it. I think it's why I like test cricket. Yes, yes. It's that you have this sense of undefined time going on and on, you know, that a sport just goes on and on.

9:08And you could check in and out of it. And I love those things. Primary school, I suppose. Next. Were you a good student? Did you excel? There must have been lots of books in the house. There must have been quite… What there was was reverence for words. There was a lot of reverence. My father, all his life could, he had that thing. I watched a thing with Richard Burton who had this tract of poetry that he had. And my dad had tracts of poetry in his head that he just knew because they were kind of life-saving, I think, for that generation. I think that they were introduced to text and I think for them it was this whole new way, an escape from the, as you say, the quotidian world into language.

9:59And certainly my father had that. He wasn't a big reader, but he was a big, he would learn poems and he would listen to a lot of classical music and there was a lot of that going on. And jazz and there was a lot of that. So there was culture in that sense. But books, I remember when we moved to Oxford that my friends' parents were all academics at the university. And I was suddenly struck by how little I knew about anything and how much I had to be cool. You had to suddenly gen up because they all had this effortless intelligence. So I spent quite a lot of time panicking and mugging up and falling in love with books, really.

10:42gosh um and you were a chorister i think you said you went to christ church cathedral are you getting your info here is that not true yeah i was a chorister chorister yeah yeah um so parents sent you privately so you went to prep school they did my mom i would say sent us privately she was the driving force she'd given up a successful acting career really to raise you and your brother yeah in a very sort of in a way that i think she looks back now and wonders why she had done very much of the era yeah wasn't it yeah but she showing she could have had um a long and flourishing career as well i sense um do you remember school do you i mean apart from the kind of early intellectual insecurity was it was it a happy experience it was a great experience i loved i loved the people i met there these friends that i met and i loved i grew to love learning and I was very fortunate I had you know one always dreams of having two or three teachers who change your life and I had those people and particularly in things like English and theology I had teachers who changed my view of everything and got me interested in in areas I wouldn't have studied otherwise but also I think the people that the students that were there were so it was a very smart school yeah and I was inspired to study by what my peer group seemed to know and I and uh that sort of continues today really we're quite blessed then to not have had to endure that kind of it's uncool to want to know stuff yeah being cool was wearing it lightly yeah of course and you did i didn't they did but you aspired to yeah perhaps um uh and the the i mean you mentioned that conversations at home would be quite philosophical as well that you would talk your parents would be talking about consciousness and heavy duty stuff like that did i say that someone what i'd say it's all on the record toby you can't you can't disown any of this this is why I should avoid these shows.

12:56No, what I would say is that having this band of friends that I had whose parents I think were academics, I think when they came to my house, they met, as I've mentioned, people who were interested in them as people and wanted to know what they thought about things and what motivated them because they were actors and they're interested and engaged with people. This I found incredibly embarrassing because I love going to their houses where you would learn about history or physics or whatever and their parents were, they weren't particularly interested in hearing about what you felt about anything.

13:34They were just interested in about what you thought about stuff. And so I think that there was that sense of, not embarrassed, but it was more, yeah, there's an interest in why people do what they do. And as much as I've got older, I've had to reconcile myself that I sort of have that interest myself. I wish I had some sort of nobler calling, but I can't help but be interested in why people do what they do, what incentivizes them, what drives them, what makes them make mistakes, how they need help, what they need. Those things interest me. I don't consciously have to work at that. What would be a nobler calling?

14:25Well, I think to be more involved in politics, to be more involved in academia, to be more involved in charities that I support, to do that stuff where it's not that I'm not involved in change, but the kind of change that people involved in drama involved in is more subliminal less concrete more one can't be sure and one wouldn't want to be sure about how that changes people yeah i get that um i don't know that i agree well i mean i agree with what you say about it being subliminal but i don't think it's less noble necessarily but as you say if you know that it's noble then you're probably doing something wrong you want to leave set the hair running and then not know where it ends up i think i have a a healthy okay i i'm always i'm always shocked by how interested people are in actors and i i've always been shocked at it i said why you should be more interested in the writers or or the directors or the designers.

15:38And then as I've got older, I realized that in a sense, I think that that interest in actors is not really about the actor. It's really about the fact that often the actors are the audience's representative in a story, that they are basically outsourcing their emotional life into an actor in a story. And they're interested about what that process, what happened to them while they were watching that story. how did that happen that i was with that person going through that experience so i get it i sort of get it but at the same time i think because i've lived with actors all my life i it feels very repetitive often what actors have got to say which isn't often very elusive that's why mr burton's such a beautiful film or such a special film isn't it because it doesn't actually really focus on the actor it focuses upon the teacher the spangali i mean for want of a more positive word than spangali the role that ph burton philip burton played in in richard burton's life it's a romance of sorts really it definitely is and what's interesting is that i think that that that that friendship that bond that you see being forged in that film in a way after the film ends when you think that you know richard jenkins who's become richard burton by being adopted by philip you think poor old philip i wonder what happened to him and actually this extraordinary expansion in his life afterwards it's not the sort of classic story he goes off and forms a drama school he goes off and comes out in florida he has this amazing life and stays friends with Richard and outlives Richard substantially but stays as a consultant to Richard all his life.

17:30So it's an amazing bond that they find in each other. They both find an escape from their circumstances in a way. I got goosebumps. I looked it up last night what happened to him afterwards because it kind of ends with the famous Henry V at Stratford that Anthony Quayle was directing. But I looked up what happened to V. H. Byrd after him and got genuine goosebumps. I thought, oh, yes! Yeah, me too. I was really excited. And weirdly, this sounds like... Anthony Hopkins emailed me after he'd seen the film and he said he knew Philip Burton as well because of this mad thing of Port Albert being this hive of actors and extraordinary people.

18:14And he said that guy was just astonishing what he achieved, you know, in that town because he revolutionized people's lives. And I suppose going back to my father, it's that story as well. Yes, of course. Of going from extreme poverty, extreme poverty, on this astral journey into a world you can't have dreamed of. My father used to describe the cinemas he grew up with. They were like palaces. You'd go in and you got a glimpse of some other world that you might be and then Burton and my father they became part of that there's a path not taken as well isn't it it's that sort of that has made all the difference the idea that they were both on rails in a way and somehow they managed to get off the rails in Burton's case by dint of Philip's intervention in your dad's case by dint of this girlfriend this visionary girlfriend exactly and if it hadn't happened then you know that have stayed on the rails so to speak in life you've already used the word ambivalent about the prospect of becoming an actor you've described how that you found the insecurity quite frightening i think if that's the right word but reading your what i've managed to glean of your life yeah i mean if i were writing a script about your life it would be typified as you running away from your destiny for much of the early years yeah that may be true that may be true i think what happened is that i went to university thinking i'm gonna become a director i'm gonna read read and read and study and have good fun you know i wasn't kind of austere but i was going to learn about how texts operated and and become a director and i think as part of that that time in Manchester so many things happened to me at Manchester in the early 80s or in the mid 80s when I was there not least a sort of political awakening not least a sort of a sense of what's the point of doing these old plays what do they add to society there were very sort of fundamental important questions that were being asked by my fellow students there had been a the revolutionary communist party One of the tutors in the department had left the year before me, and his legacy was that the whole department had been radicalized in such a way that you weren't just putting on plays.

20:59You were having to sort of rigorously defend any cultural decision you made and how it would be adding to the progressive forces in society. And at the time, it was very intimidating to arrive in that atmosphere as a student. And I look back on it as being so invaluable because the rigor and the scrutiny with which you made decisions made you question texts in ways that I hadn't been expecting to question at all. and it was the time of clause 28 and it was a time of the miners strike and it was the time of virage mendes holding out in a chapel in in moss side and the drama department and people in the drama department were very much involved in political campaigns outside of the department so anyway there i was coming to university i think i was going to you know do shakespeare and beckett and all of this stuff.

21:58And clearly that wasn't the order of the day. What the order of the day was making your own stuff, making it urgent and relevant. And as a result of that, a lot of our seminars at university often came to the same conclusion week after week, was that the current theatre was dead and what was the point of it and the future lay elsewhere. and gradually as you got older and you got better informed you realized that there were counter arguments but towards the end of that I came across this drama school where I went to which I went to subsequently in Paris where I didn't have to make a decision about whether I want to be a director an actor a designer produce you did all of it you're a writer you you made theater it It was a training in theater making.

22:50And the actor, as in the original actors who pulled carts around, they did the whole thing. They were producers, actors, directors. They weren't waiting for work. They were making it. And in fact, the tremendous sense of impetus you got from the school as you left it was you will never be unemployed. Okay. You will make work. If there is not work, you will make it because that's what you have been equipped to do. this is Lecoq a famous school but also a famously rigorous training but I sense that you've embraced that wholeheartedly yeah I think James when you're writing my biography you might want to put a chapter in about this where I say I think that that training I casually say that I use it every day of my life but I sort of do because it gave me such incredible skills to observe and a language with which to talk about movement and change and drama and to use those tools.

24:01It was the most extraordinary two years of my life. How did you find out about it when you say you stumbled across it? I saw little companies doing it. Compliste had just started, Theatre of Compliste and they'd started and little companies who had been formed at the school were tour to the green room that was still open in manchester and you'd see and you'd and i read a little bit huh on whitworth yeah that's it i've performed there have you what did you do that another day i gave them my real inspector hound many many moves ago great play it is a great play so you knew about it but you also had this drive to to go i mean a lot of people at manchester in in that era well all training schools in that era would have perhaps heard of it but not got their act together to actually go for two years it speaks of a seriousness in approach to the craft oh yeah i know and i and and that intensified there i think a sense of um well what you want from further education which is a sense of vocation a sense of that that's what you get from further education if you're lucky enough to find what it is you want to do here's a way to do it here's a way and here's a set of values with which to do it and here's an outlook and we're going to treat it in a way that you can value not sort of you know I'm sure people got it from British drama schools it's just I want to I think I wanted to study with people from different cultures which you did it's an international school and I wanted to study with him because he had his own agenda.

25:40And it was way better than I could have expected, even though there were shocks. I mean, it was obviously a kind of casual decision because on the first day I remember they said, so now we've got acrobatics. I remember going, we've got what? We've got acrobatics. They said, did you read the prospectus? I said, no, I read about the writing and the improvising and the devising, not the acrobatics. so there's a slow chipping away then at the determination not to be an actor and this is the final part of that process is in paris because even even as you left manchester you could have been a playwright or a director or um let's just back up a bit back to school but still in oxford at abingdon school did it begin there did you saw because you kept getting drawn back to the school plays didn't you and it's it's presumably the amount of pleasure you got out of it must have been a fairly significant part of this process yeah at my school the people who did plays again were people you sort of wanted to hang around with they were people i'm sure it's the same at your school to a point we had rugby as a religion sadly so so the acting was a yeah but the cool kids were all doing drama yeah you know and you sort of wanted to hang around with them and and also the in a way the cool teachers were were directing the plays and you sort of wanted to hang around with them and there was a cut there were interesting things there were little nights where you could put on your own little tiny bits of writing at school and and i think that they played on my mind and and i think as with the music that you you know i was getting into at the time music was a big part of it and of just going, I want to be part of culture.

27:26Whatever I do, I want to be part of culture. And the school, to give it its due, did encourage that. Radiohead, that band were all at my school. And as much as they rage against the school, they don't rage against the music department. They talk about how much they were introduced to different ways of thinking about music by the music teacher. So I think that at that time it was an interesting school, the kind of people who were there. I don't know why the word value keeps popping into my head as you speak. You really want what you do to have value, don't you? And this approach to the training is about searching for the stuff that has value, I think.

28:11Yeah. I got asked recently because of the kind of projects that I've been doing recently. And I think they asked this question. Does everything have to have a political dimension, which is kind of, of course, it doesn't. I don't mean that. No, but what I would say is in terms of value, I think it needs to be moving things forward. It needs to be adding to culture rather than just sort of leaving culture flat. and I think that often stuff that I might get sent if it's if it's if something I've already done there is a sense of yeah I could do that but in a way I'd like to have a as rich a different kind of culture that I could have that because that would make it valuable to me well that's yeah I was thinking of value to you as in it's going to make me grow or I'm going to get something out of it that I haven't found before well I have this opportunity that I've been given that I'm being given and I'm incredibly fortunate we don't need to go into the stats of it but I mean I'm incredibly fortunate and to get to grow older as a specifically as a man I would say to nurture one's curiosity and child likeness not childishness which is the bad side of being an actor but child like a kind of child like wonder that one wants to keep as one gets sold it it's a value that one wants to keep i think that that's that kind of stuff my job gives me access to that my job can give me access to yeah a delight in the world that i see with my friends in other jobs there's a kind of just a slight retreat into what they know rather than what might be possible just and that's just a thing of aging and i think i have an opportunity in my job to choose a slightly different path that i think i see women more than men able to do throughout their lives that i just i maybe i may be hazarding a guess there definitely can see what you mean for people who've just sort of woken up from a coma we should probably mention that part of the reason why you'd be associated with political parties because of the success of mr bates versus the post office in which he played mr bates um and he just got his his payoff last week I'm here to tell you that whatever was reported is totally not true I spoke to Alan, I said I was going to be meeting and I said what needs to be corrected Alan, he said well what I was awarded was nothing like what they've reported I was awarded and he said don't forget to remind them that there's at least 100 of the original 555 who still haven't received anything and it's a great source of disappointment to me that when people come up and thank me for what I supposedly did, which I didn't, I was just in a show about it.

31:09But they go, well done. And I go, I just should tell you, it's not over. Yeah, of course. The show's over. The struggle is not over. And people continue to die without getting their money back. And it's such an appalling scandal. And I hate to put a down on it, but it really, it would be great to go, the show changed things. And it did, but it'll only have changed things when those people get their blooming money. That's interesting. I'll get back to that on the radio then because there was a sense in last week's reporting of a full stop being applied and obviously that's not something that...

31:41No, and there are people very interested to make that happen. Of course they are, yeah. Leave it with me.

31:51I'll tell you a question I hope you don't mind me asking. Given that your father sort of fell into it, essentially, how did he respond to your very um serious approach to training and to and to and to craft and to fine honing your talent i think he treated it far more seriously than other actors i met in the sense that he as i as i sort of implied i think the

32:22when he went to drama school in England aged 29 or something he couldn't believe what was on offer to him and I think it as I said I think it saved his mental health I think it saved his life and he was forever grateful at the same time the romance that he had of just being able to say he was an actor was very different from mine because I sort of had to find my own relationship with it. He was pretty practical about it with me. He said you know occasionally people would tell me maybe Toby when I was younger maybe he'd like to come and be in this professional production. He said no it was the only thing he was really stupid he said I don't think you should do that.

33:08I don't think you should study. I think you should see that out. And he was pretty clear about that and then he also said it wasn't that he was disappointed that I became an actor not at all but I think he said you need to be really clear about what limitations may be put on you by your appearance that you go into, actors go into it thinking I can play anything David's talked about this, David Airwood he came out of drama school I can play anything and suddenly he was a black actor suddenly I was a short actor and that sense of being conditioned by people's gaze is a fundamental issue for actors that they have to be aware of and try and resist and fight to negotiate in such a way that you don't become trapped by it.

34:02Find a way to not become trapped by it. But then there are actors who are probably happy to do that. So the Lecoq training would have been particularly helpful in that field, in that front. Exactly, yeah. And that comes to an end in 91. you head back to Britain with my theatre company with your theatre company that centres around Battersea around the Arts Centre in Battersea and you are doing the kind of theatre that you wanted to do we do a very physical device that we make that's based on things we go out and watch and research with your barrel exactly we had actually learnt all of that stuff about how to do a play on a little platform and all of that so all of that that amazing language that we'd been given and we were keen to do it going to the Edinburgh Festival, all the things you'd expect, and then touring and subsequently making shows that toured the world a bit and living that side of it, which I'm now really grateful that I had that sort of 10-year period.

34:59Also because a lot of the people I met during that period have subsequently been subsumed into the mainstream. Right. And we all had this, you know, when you read about, you know an artistic scene in history where there's all this group of artists gathered in in portavoy in the south of france making these paintings like no one else was making them well i'm not trying to make i'm not trying to over romanticize it but there were a lot of people in their early 20s in little companies able to live on unemployment benefit able to get housing benefit making shows going to see each other's shows talking what was wrong with your friend show what was right arguing how this was and a little culture around batsy art center developed i would say in the early 90s that when i look back on it now we're so reassuring and so consoling because no one in the world needed our work no one needed it you know but we all needed to believe that we were sort of going to be changing the theatrical culture.

36:10How do you know you're good, Toby? Well, if someone pays you money to do it, they're saying you can do, we believe you can do a job. I think as I get older, when someone comes to me with a part, said, would you like to play this part? I don't find it getting any easier. I find it, if anything, getting harder. I just go, so much of my job is persuading myself that I could be that person, like literally become someone else. I have to do everything I can do to make that possible. That's sort of what my technique is. How do I persuade myself that I can be what they see that I can be? They see I can play that part.

36:57I don't see it. I've got to make a way. And that's sort of my job. So good, I don't know. I think good, ultimately, I don't want to be sort of too down on it, but I think if people have paid you and they ask you back to do it again, that's a sign. And the phone keeps ringing. But what about in the moment? What about when you're on? I don't. As I get older, I don't think you do. Really? I'm increasingly skeptical about actors who think they know when they've done a good show. who think they know when they've done a good scene, who look at the monitor and go, oh, I mean, I think there's things you can change and all that of it.

37:39But ultimately, it's a very strange thing to try and perceive yourself as others see you and assess what they've taken from something. In a theatre, you've got people at least in 180 degrees observing you, observing you from all of those different angles of each different seat. Of course. All have a totally different perspective on what you've done. All hearing it slightly differently. All understanding it at slightly different speeds. And then for you to come off and go, that was a good one. Yeah, you might feel that there was a tension in the room. That there was laughter when you expected to be laughter.

38:19That there was a gasp. And you think things are happening in that room. Things are changing in that room. when atmosphere is shifting. You might feel that. But in terms of your own particular performance, I feel I never want to look at the monitor after a scene.

38:42I, when I do watch myself, which I'm forced to do, I only see what I didn't do. I don't really see what I did do. I very rarely get, I go, wow, that really doesn't look like it felt to do. it felt so different to do that it's alchemy yeah i guess i guess i mean i wouldn't make big claims for it but i mean i i think it's uh people are very i've been very lucky people people are very complimentary about my work and i i don't take it lightly but i sort of forget it all the time so how and well when and then how did you start getting subsumed into the mainstream straight out of Battersea well there were a couple of guys called Sean and Hamish who ran a company called The Right Size who were a brilliant brilliant company that I sort of worshipped and I was a fan of the company and they had a big hit after about 15 years of work they had a big hit which won an Olivier award called Do You Come Here Often a clown show based on the Brian Keenan book of an evil cradling about two guys who get kidnapped and put in a room absolutely incredible show and they they have a friends of mine we'd work together doing little bits and pieces and they said oh we've been asked to do a show about morcom and wise um and we're a double act we would do it's going to be a show in which a double act get asked to do morcom wise and one of them wants to do a tribute show the morcom wise the other one doesn't and the thing becomes a tribute show to Morgan Wise in that dynamic and we need someone to play all the other parts would you do that?

40:26I said I don't think I would do that I'd play someone who has to play all those parts rather than play all those parts and they were very kind and they created this character Arthur, people who know about Morgan Wise know there was a character going not now Arthur and this character called Arthur David Pugh the brilliant theatre producer produced this show and we had guest stars every night like on the Morgan Wise show and the show sort of became a runaway success and went to Broadway as unlikely as that seemed. And I think at that point, people became more aware of me, not least in America, in New York, where there was a producer who came to see the first night in New York and the show didn't do particularly well in New York, but he said there's a guy in this show who looks just like Truman Capote and there's a script out there called at that time it was called Every Word is True by a great late writer-director called Doug McGrath and about three years after he'd seen me in that show I was asked to screen test for that film which subsequently became infamous the film was called infamous and infamously there were two Truman Capote films at the same time but that again I think that those two events meant that I had, there was an awareness of me that there hadn't been before.

41:55I'd done little bits and bobs. And so there wouldn't have been one without the other then, really? No, absolutely not. If the producer hadn't been in there that night to see it. So where's that sort of turn of the millennium roughly? 2000, so it goes to New York in 2003. Yeah. And then the Truman Capote film eventually gets made in 2005. So there's a decade then before that. Of that work. Of enjoying. Of being like, of being, like being people who open doors in movie and point heroes in the way he went that way. And or having two, two pictures or being my lady, here's your hat or, you know, whatever it is.